headshot of Liese Zahabi

Liese Zahabi

Associate Professor
Phone: (603) 862-2190
Office: Art & Art History, Paul Creative Arts Center, Durham, NH 03824

Liese Zahabi is an associate professor of interaction/graphic design in the Department of Art and Art History at UNH. She previously served as faculty at the University of Maryland in College Park and at Weber State University in Utah. She earned a Master of Graphic Design degree from North Carolina State University, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a concentration in graphic design from Eastern Michigan University. She has been working as a designer since 2000 and teaches courses in graphic design, interaction design, motion design and animation, typography, game design, user experience and design research. Professor Zahabi’s academic research focuses on search as a cognitive and cultural process, and how the design of metaphoric interfaces can change the experience of digital search tasks. Her creative design work is also metaphorical and explores how the nature of search manifests itself in visual patterns and sense-making, how the digital record influences memory and our understanding of history, and how language and image intersect within the context of the Internet. Professor Zahabi's first book, Beyond the Search Engine Design of the Online Search Experience will be published with Routledge in December 2024; she also published Thinking Out Loud: An Invitation for Designers to Consider the Voice User Interface (VUI) in the design journal Dialectic in 2022.

Courses Taught

  • ARTS 510: Principles of Design
  • ARTS 600: Internship in Studio Art
  • ARTS 610: Principles of Typography
  • ARTS 611: Animation and Motion Design
  • ARTS 612: Interaction & Game Design
  • ARTS 613: Design and Place
  • ARTS 614: Design and People
  • ARTS 700H: Honors Seminar
  • ARTS 796: Ind Study: Studio Art/Design

Education

  • MGD, Graphic Design, North Carolina State University
  • B.F.A., Graphic Design, Eastern Michigan Univ

Research Interests

  • 3D Modeling / Visualization
  • Access to Data/Information
  • Cognition
  • Computer Games/Gaming
  • Computer Graphics
  • Computer Interface
  • Computer/Digital Arts
  • Critical analysis and development of interfaces
  • Design history and pedagogy
  • Design of digital art and creative experiments
  • Digital Communications
  • Ethnography
  • Games in Education
  • Games Theory
  • Graphic Design
  • Information Science/Systems
  • Interfaces
  • Internet
  • Universal Design
  • Virtual Reality
  • Visual Arts

Artistic Activities & Publications